Tuesday, 8 September 2015

This Month I Shall Be Learning...

I've signed up for a Massive Open Online Course (apparently a MOOC). Basically this is an online course provided by FutureLearn (which is owned by the Open University) and partner institutions.

The course I'm doing is Empire: The Controversies of British Imperialism, provided by the University of Exeter. It's only a six-week course, so won't too taxing or in-depth; but I hope it will be interesting. I'm doing this one as a taster, and may take other courses in the future.

A question for those of you who have done MOOCs before: FutureLearn stress the 'community' aspect of these online courses. How central is that to them? Given the subject matter, I imagine it will attract some idiots and the forum will have flame wars - I can do without that!

I got my History degree via the OU a decade ago. After the first year I never bothered with the weekly tutorial or any of the online forums/groups as I personally didn't get much out of them...but then I'm a bit antisocial. I never felt like I was missing anything out and, in fact, I did rather well just on my lonesome.

Good luck, I've never done a MOOC but I did some research on them for my university to see if it was for us. Generally the conclusion was that it didn't fit with the courses we did (civil engineering and geology and therefore very hands on). However they did look interesting if you picked the right subject - history would be ideal as there is lots of background reading and then lectures explaining the current thinking. Keep us posted

I did a course through Future learn some time ago (on Forensics...seemed like a good idea at the time!). I pretty much ignored the 'social' aspects of the course despite the regular messages telling me how good it would be to chat and share ideas...didn't seem to make much difference to the experience.